6 hours ago
(This post was last modified: 6 hours ago by KillerLeft.)
(Yesterday, 05:03 PM)RoyTarpleysGhost Wrote: The Mavs are one of the worst teams in the league. Gafford is the only functional center on the roster. All this talk of trading him because he is not the ideal starting Center on a championship team is about 4-5 years premature. Let him get healthy, play next to Kyrie and Flagg, and rehab some trade value next year. We already saw he doesn't have much trade value right now. I don't know why everyone is in a rush.
I see this point and agree, to an extent. And, if the pick and roll game gets going again (pretty huge if) he could look good again very quickly.
However, I don't personally believe there is any chance of the Mavs being competitive next year. "Good," maybe, but not of any consequence. Maybe I am jumping the gun, but for me it's more about selling high on a player I don't believe will still be here when things next matter. The "fish out of water" aspect of his (current, to be fair) fit here is part of it for me, too, but that could change with the addition of a single player.
I'll say this (right or wrong): IF the plan is to run the offense through Flagg then I don't think Gafford is the right guy no matter how quickly things move along. I also think it's telling that he arguably fits IND's needs better than Zubac and yet they opted to make a crazy deal involving a fair amount of risk of losing a premium pick in this draft to get Zubac instead. Obviously, Zubac is better, overall - we all knew that. But, I didn't think it was this big of a gap. Zubac has only really been at this level for a year or two. I think it tells us a lot about either the league's temperature on Gafford's extension numbers or that Mavs were asking for too much (maybe both). If it's the latter, maybe they just didn't really want to trade him, but there was a lot of reporting out there that they just wanted a first round pick, so...
Regardless, now that AD is gone, I'm no longer in the "too many centers on this roster" camp, and I could definitely see trying Gafford again with a healthier and hopefully more complete roster as a viable option...just not if the offense is going to result in so much throwing him the ball in the low post. That's a joke, and not who he is as a player.